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Leadership and Life Cycles - Situational Leadership

Situational Leadership Lessons from the Rise and Fall

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Any background in leadership or management will be helpful, but not required.

Description

All living things follow a path from birth to death, from the chaos of rapid growth to the stability of maturity and then decay. The study of civilizations and corporations proves a similar life cycle of integration and then disintegration and leaders are the primary cause of both. Durig this course you will assess your own leadership style, the dominant style of your organization, and place your organization on the life cycle curve. You will understand the attributes of leaders who can renew and rescue a company from what may appear to be the inevitable decline. And, you will understand the necessary diversity of leadership styles required to maintain a company or culture in a mature state.

Who is the target audience?

Anyone in a management or leadership position in any organization.

Any consultant, coach or change agent seeking to enhance the culture and performance of organizations.

Mark Twain said “History doesn’t repeat itself – but it does rhyme.”
That is probably an accurate assessment of the value of history. There
are broad patterns that seem to follow some natural evolution as there
are natural patterns in the birth and growth of infants, animals and
even plants. There can be no exact roadmap drawn from history, but there
can be wisdom derived from the patterns. The culture at the birth of a
company or civilization is of one kind, and that is entirely different
than the culture at maturity or in decline. The behavior of leaders,
their relationships, skills and intentions are different at each age.
And wealth varies by stage. Obviously at birth a company is not rich
in financial assets. But it may be rich in innovation or in the
spiritual quality of dedication to a worthy purpose. In maturity a
company becomes increasingly focused on the refinement of process and
builds its social capital both in brand equity and internal relations.
Material resources are growing, and with that growth the motivations are
likely to shift from the single cause the excited the early followers
to a more narrow self -interest. And as financial assets increase and
managers are increasingly drawn from those who know more about finance
and mechanisms of financial control, the innovative spirit declines, and
social relations fragment. Companies toward their end, like
civilizations, decline in a process of social disintegration, the loss
of trust and innovation. The loss of money is only the last sign of
decay.

The important thing to understand is that leaders are diverse, with different styles and skills. But leaders provide that competence and style that is needed in a particular organization and a particular time.

What is a leader?

Not Position, but process.

A leader recognizes a challenge, a threat or an opportunity, and responds creatively to that challenge.

Someone who is out front, creating new paths, products, markets, before others.

Someone who Motivates others to arise to challenge by creating a worthy, ennobling purpose for which others will sacrifice.

Someone who develops and implements solutions.

What is Leadership?

13:30

In maturity leaders are subordinate to process and principles. A constitutional democracy puts principles and process above personalities. Cultures and companies in their early stages and in their last stages of decline have leaders who dominate over process and principles.

Personalities or Process?

05:58

This synopsis contains the major points of my Barbarians to Bureaucrats book and the self-assessments that are presented in the following lectures.

Synopsis of Barbarians to Bureaucrats

25 pages

+–

The Culture Curve

3 Lectures
27:14

In the life cycle of civilizations and companies there is a twin-fold
process of integration and disintegration. Civilizations or companies,
when growing, expand their borders and are integrating different people,
ideas, competencies, and cultures. When they cease the process of
integration and expansion, they start defending their borders and
building walls to keep out the energetic barbarians, and the process of
internal disintegration begins. As the focus shifts from offense to
defense, the focus of energy is increasingly internal rather than
external. The spirit of unity of purpose increasingly becomes the spirit
of self interest and internal division. Soon the body of the culture is
engaged in internal warfare and self-mutilation, and the enemy does not
so much conquer as to march in to fill the void created by the
impotence of the old culture. Toynbee concluded that the decline of
every civilization was not at the hands of an external enemy but rather
an act of suicide, the loss of will, and the disintegration of the
culture. Whether or not you accept Toynbee's analysis of the rise and
fall of civilizations, there are clearly lessons for leaders of
companies and countries. You can see these in the emerging periods of
the Prophet, Barbarian and Builder and Explorer. You can also see the
decay and decline beginning the dominance of the Administrator, the
Barbarian and the Aristocrat. You can only hope to see an age of the
Synergist, when the best qualities are held in balance.

“Reasonable men adapt
themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their
environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the
efforts of unreasonable men.”
George Bernard Shaw“Lean
Start-Ups: Human institutions designed to create something new under
conditions of extreme uncertainty.” Entrepreneurship is a management
science. Those that succeed are those who can
pivot, within every bad idea is the kernel of a good idea, waiting to be
recognized. Most ideas are bad ideas, but move in a direction of what
works in the marketplace. “Pivots” are the key. “We
achieved failure.”

They reality distortion field that convinces people that they know what customers want. It is usually wrong.

That we can accurately predict the future. This causes you to fail the test of flexibility or adaptation.

Success is following the plan.

In
the beginning is the word, the creative act, the spirit of renewal.
Creative personalities, including religious prophets, seem to follow a
pattern of withdrawal-and-return. They disappear into the mountains or
desert. They remove themselves from the distractions of the current
order and seek some vision of a better future. Their power to inspire
others is only seen on their return when they are intentionally
disruptive. A revolution begins and their followers can hardly be called
an organization, more a group of disciples. It is disruption, not
order. It is the nature of creative personalities. The vision of these
prophets is like a rocket blast, a surge of energy that disturbs the old
and propels movement toward something new. Often these prophets are
incapable of doing their work within the framework of the old order, but
must but be exiled to a new land. As new wine must be put in new
bottles, so too, may the new wine of innovation require the new bottle
of new organization,
(Mar 2:22 And no man putteth new wine
into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the
wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be
put into new bottles.)

You may be a Prophet if…

Your ideas are long range and visionary.

You are willing to make great sacrifices in time and energy to see your ideas realized.

You tend to withdraw for long periods to work through your ideas.

You see challenges others don’t see.

Others see you as a bit “different,” (You were not most popular in high school!)

You’re probably not very well organized, and you are impatient with details and administration.

Your organization may be in the Prophet stage if…

Your leader is a visionary and creative person on whose ideas the company was founded.

Your organization is at risk because it has not yet proved its product’s viability in the marketplace.

There is more chaos than organization, with things changing daily, reporting relationships unclear, and processes undefined.

There is an excitement and deep belief in what you are trying to accomplish.

The Prophet: In the Beginning was the Word

14:51

The Failure of the Prophet

08:02

“To be a successful soldier,
you must know history… What you must know is how man reacts. Weapons
change, but man, who uses them, changes not at all. To win battles, you
do not beat weapons – you beat the soul of the enemy man.”
George S. Patton IV

The prophet founders of companies are soon followed by, or become themselves, barbarians,
the commanding generals whose strength of will focuses energy in
crisis. The idea and inspiration is not enough. Decisive action is now
required to build a company. Every new company is in a crisis, a fight
for survival. When business is in a fight for survival it has more in
common with war than many managers realize. The ability to move quickly,
with discipline and unity of energy and effort, is the key to victory.

You may be a Barbarian if…

Your mission is clear and urgent. Conquer or die is the priority.

You are in charge and very comfortable making decisions.

Others accuse you of being authoritarian and not consulting them on decisions.

You are very action-oriented and have little patience with planning and administration.

Your organization may be in the Barbarian age if…

It is rapidly expanding, taking in new territory and integrating the conquered.

Decisions are made quickly and the leader may only consult a small group of associates.

Growth in products and markets is far ahead of the growth in administration, processes and organization structure.

The demand for performance is high and those who can’t are left behind or expelled.

The Barbarian: The Conquering Hero of Command

14:28

The Failure of the Barbarian

05:20

The period of the Prophet may be a brief
moment in the history of the corporation. The age of the Barbarian
should also be short. If an organization’s leadership remains in the
Barbarian Age, its growth will be arrested. It must move on and enter a
period of specialization, a time when systems and structure take form,
and the organization matures.

Now leadership has to
take on a different character. It must be shared, delegated, and
increasingly collaborative. While the leaders must continue to be
creative and fast moving, they must also develop increasingly
specialized competence in production, service, marketing, and sales. If
they do, this third stage may last for centuries in the life of
civilization and decades for a corporation.

The primary
leaders in this period of specialization are the Builder and Explorer.
The Builders will construct the internal capacity of efficient
production, while the Explorers continue the push outward, expanding the
boundaries of the developing corporation or culture. In civilization
the Builders are literally building cities, roads, reservoirs, libraries
and stadiums; the Explorers are conquering new territory to expand the
scope and influence of the culture by integrating diverse people. In
corporations the Builders are creating the means of production, they are
making production efficient. The Explorers are out conquering new
customers and territories, seeking to dominate their competition.

In
the first two stages of development, growth is highly dependent upon
the individual leader, the Prophet and the Barbarian. But in the third
stage, the environment – both internal and external – is becoming too
complex for such centralized decision making.

You may be a builder if…

You enjoy the “real work” of your company, making the product or delivering the service.

You enjoy measuring the results of your work.

You like to make decisions quickly, take action, and see results.

You know you are not a visionary and don’t waste a lot of time dreaming about the future.

You don’t like committees or sitting around wasting time talking.

You may be an Explorer if…

You are a convincing and enthusiastic communicator.

You
sometimes feel that you work for you customers and others in your own
company often seem to be obstacles to your goal of serving your
customers.

You believe your company should place a high priority on expansion.

You are curious and you naturally explore for new opportunities for your company.

You love to keep score, and you are competitive by nature.

Your organization is in the Building and Exploring Age if…

Your products or services have proven to have a competitive advantage and you are growing rapidly.

You are now profitable and you can add needed staff to develop management systems and to make processes routine and stable.

You are hiring more, and the jobs are becoming more specialized.

There is a high confidence in the future.

The Builder and Explorer: Stability, Specialization, and Differentiation

19:46

The Failure of the Builder and Explorer

09:18

+–

Wealth Destroying Leaders and Life Cycle Stages

3 Lectures
47:46

“Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.” Thomas Watson, Sr. (Founder, IBM)

“The arrested civilizations have achieved so close an adaptation to
their environment that they have taken its shape and colour and rhythm
instead of impressing the environment with a stamp which is their own.
The equilibrium of forces in their life is so exact that all their
energies are absorbed in the effort of maintaining the position which
they have attained already, and there is no margin of energy left over
for reconnoitering the course of the road ahead, or the face of the
cliff above them, with a view to a further advance.”
Arnold Toynbee

Increasingly
the challenge is within, not from the external environment.
Increasingly the leaders are seeking to bring order to the chaos of
differentiated organization created in the previous stage. Counting and
recording, systems and structure, are now important. And increasingly
the processes of administration become dominant in their minds, and the
leaders are drawn from the administrators. In time, with Administrators
in charge, counting and recording become more important than the
substance and spirit of creativity, the response to the external
challenge that was the source of initial growth. Increasingly the focus
is on internal, rather than external, challenges. The unchecked
priorities of administration will soon lead to bureaucracy.

It is
difficult to accept that chaos is good. But growth, in people or
cultures, implies some degree of chaos. If you want a perfectly clean
and orderly house, do not have children. Children, in their most rapid
periods of growth, are a mess, and create a mess around them. Mess is
good. In old age, the personality becomes obsessed with order and
control. Just as the bones become brittle, so too does the mind become
intolerant of innovation. But, there is a middle ground, a balance
between the disorder of growth and innovation and needs of administering
differentiated organization.

Initially administration serves the
needs of those producing and selling, building and exploring. To manage
a large manufacturing or selling organization you must know where
things are, how many you have, and what they cost. Initially, to “take
account” is to assist those engaged in the work that serves customers.
But it shifts, and it gradually appears that those producing and selling
increasingly come to serve those administering. It is the turning of
this tide that signals the entry into the Administrative stage.

In
this fourth stage, the corporation is holding its ground, creating and
maintain order. And now the successful leaders face their single
greatest test. Are they able to maintain forward motion, continue to be
creative, decisive, and develop increasing competence, while at the same
time administering secured territory? If they can, the organization
will break through to that ideal balance that assures continued health.
If they can’t and the Administrator becomes the dominant leader,
imposing his cultural priorities, decline will begin.

You may be an Administrator if…

You developed your career in the corporation’s staff functions.

You consider yourself expert at the procedures, processes and systems of management.

Order, consistency, and smooth operations are high priorities for you.

You
devote more time to checking on what has happened, as reflected in
financial and other reports, than you spend focused on future growth in
products, services, or customers.

Your organization may be in the Administrative Age if…

Much of the energy of the managers is devoted to streamlining and improving procedures.

You are well established in your market and feel confident that customers will continue to buy from you.

There is little sense of urgency or crisis.

Your organization is investing in expensive offices and staff headquarters.

New products or services are expected to come from the staff research and development group.

The Administrator: The Search for an Orderly Life

16:29

“The piper who has lost his
cunning can no longer conjure the feet of the multitude into a dance;
and if, in a rage and panic, he now attempts to turn himself into a
drill sergeant or a slave-driver, and to coerce by force a people whom
he feels that he can no longer lead by his old magnetic charm, then, all
the more surely and more swiftly, he defeats his own intention; for the
followers who had merely flagged and fallen behind as the heavenly
music died away will be stung by a touch of the whip into active
rebellion.”
Arnold Toynbee

The transition from the
Administrative Stage to that of the Bureaucrat occurs without any plan
or intention. Old age happens. It needs no encouragement. No one in the
history of organization ever created a design team to design and
implement bureaucracy.

As soon as the leader imposes increasing levels of control in his love for order, he becomes a bureaucrat
and loses understanding of the original organizing principle that was
the energy created by the “word,” the creative act that was the reason
to unite and sacrifice. Now the lack of creativity leads to impotence in
the marketplace, and survival is dependent on cost cutting and control
and anyone with the creative spirit, potential Prophets who possess the
very cure that is so needed are driven to exile or crucified for their
violation of order. The decline will soon lead to death. The bureaucracy
causes the exile or execution of those who are creative but unable to
conform to the required order. With the departure of creativity, the
fate of the company is sealed

You may be a Bureaucrat if…

You spend most of your time in meetings reviewing what has already happened or should have happened.

You
cannot remember when you last participated in the development of a new
product or service… and, you don’t think that’s your job.

You are more concerned with how you and your company are viewed by Wall Street analysts than by your customers.

You believe tighter control will solve many of your organization’s problems.

You spend more time with central staff managers than with line sales and production managers and workers.

Your organization may be in the Bureaucratic Age if…

Your company is growing more by acquisition than by internal new product creation.

Your company has reorganized more than once in the past three years.

You are more interested in the internal challenges of the organization than the external marketplace.

Employees and managers alike feel that they can do little to alter the company’s fortunes.

Managers and employees tend to talk about the “good old days” when things were exciting and fun.

Managing or fixing the systems and structure receives more time and attention than selling and producing.

The Bureaucrat: The Tight Grip of Control

14:29

Management derives its power from its
legitimacy, and in the Aristocratic Age legitimacy is lost. It is lost
because the managers have stopped doing their job, that of leading,
creating vision, and building unity of energy and effort across diverse
people and interests. Peter Drucker said:

“Power has to
be legitimate. Otherwise it has only force and no authority, is only
might and never right. To be legitimate, power has to be grounded
outside of itself in something transcending that is accepted as a
genuine value… If power is an end in itself, it becomes despotism, both
illegitimate and tyrannical.”[1]

Legitimacy is a matter
of perception, and it is the perceptions of the constituent groups that
matter. In every relationship there must be a balance of power, a
mutual concern, and respect. When these mechanisms break down,
leadership acts on its own interests, and contrary to the interests of
its followers; rebellion inevitably results.

The
disintegration of culture may appear as either an internal revolution or
an attack by a competing Barbarian. In either case, the cause is the
same: the loss of social unity brought about by alienation of the
leaders and their loss of legitimacy. It is not employees who become
alienated from the leaders. It is leaders who have divorced their
followers. They have moved to the 48
th floor of the
office tower and spent too much of their time surrounded by others who
are striving to achieve the same level of detachment from workers and
customers. The more detached are the leaders, the more incapable they
are of recognizing challenges and issuing forth a creative response to
challenge. Woodrow Wilson understood:

“I do not believe
that any man can lead who does not act, whether it be consciously or
unconsciously, under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom
he leads – a sympathy which is insight – and insight which is of the
heart rather than of the intellect.”

At this stage, the
leader’s focus, his motivation, has shifted from serving others to
serving self. In the later days of a society, the leaders become
obsessed with material self-gratification. This obsession is largely due
to the loss of gratification normally derived from productive work.
There is satisfaction to be derived from sawing and sanding wood into a
piece of furniture, from designing, testing, and watching a mechanical
object come to life, from listening to a customer and sincerely
striving to meet his or her needs. All of these pleasures are lost to
the Aristocrat. Now, the rewards come from the appearance of wealth. The
irony is that the Aristocrat is not achieving greater satisfaction than
a productive individual of modest resources. The supervisor whose team
sets a new production record is undoubtedly achieving a higher level of
satisfaction than the Aristocrat purchasing the Gulfstream IV or the new
limousine or conducting grand meetings at a country club. The
Aristocrat has been so long removed from productive work that he or she
no longer remembers their satisfactions.

You may be an Aristocrat if…

You
manage an organization that has not successfully developed and marketed
a new product or service for several years, and your only expectation
for growth is through acquisition.

Most of your time
is spent on financial matters, strategic planning, and restructuring
the organization, not with those who have their hands on producing or
selling products or services.

Your offices are plush
with expensive artwork, you have limousine service, and you spend a lot
of time at expensive social gatherings, for business, of course.

You feel that only you and a small circle of advisers are capable of understanding the strategy of the corporation.

Your organization may be in the Aristocratic Age if…

There
is a complete separation in perception, expectations, and communication
between those workers and managers who produce and sell and those who
claim to be the leaders of the corporation.

The leader thinks of himself (herself) as indispensible and almost synonymous with the company.

A great deal of the time and energy is spent in internal warfare, both between horizontal units and vertical “classes.”

There is an almost constant process of reorganizing.

There
is a continual effort to cut costs, hold down wages, and the leaders
are constantly warning of the gravity of the situation, yet their own
compensation is increasing with no apparent relationship to the fate of
the business.

Is
it inevitable that growth and expansion are followed by bureaucracy and
decline? If you study the course of civilization you might reach that
conclusion as the long march of cycles appears as an inevitable pattern.
But Arnold Toynbee asked himself this question some years after he
wrote
A Study of History. His answer was “no”. He said
that he believed in free will. He believed that if we understand the
causes of integration and disintegration, of emergence and decline, we
can alter our behavior and achieve an ever-advancing civilization. It is
the failure to recognize and respond to new challenges that leads to a
condition of ease, to the loss the power of self-determination, the loss
of will.

In human aging there are chemical biological
processes over which we have no control. Of course, we can greatly
influence human aging with diet, exercise, and our own social and mental
activity. Organizations, on the other hand can be influenced even more.
They are inherently capable of regeneration. Managers change, products
change, the market changes, and all of these are opportunities for
adaptation, and for adjusting the style, culture, and processes to
prolong the life of the organization. The 3M Corporation has been
through numerous periods of refocus, redefining its product portfolio,
constantly innovating and maintaining its social capital within the
organization and its brand equity. It is an “old” corporation that can
act young. There are many other examples. And, of course there are
examples of organizations that fail to adapt to new markets and
technologies and become rigid and lose their ability to innovate within a
very short period.

Revolution is the transformation
brought about by leaders who recognize new challenges, acknowledge the
failure to adapt to a changing landscape, and promote a new outlook, a
new spirit, and new strategy. Corporations have proven that there is no
fixed time frame of life cycles. The key to this success is always the
ability to create synergy of the different styles or capabilities of
leadership and to maintain a healthy balance of the five forms of
wealth.

What are the lessons of this story? I think
there are several. One is the diversity of leadership styles that are
needed to fulfill the potential of any organization. As companies
mature, the need for the creative Prophet does not disappear; nor does
the need for the conquering spirit of the Barbarian. But what is needed
is balance and the creation of synergy or harmony between the diversity
of talents, each put to work on the challenges appropriate to the type
of temperament. The most difficult of all tasks of leadership is to
create unity from diversity. It is the purpose of a leadership team. On a
leadership team you do not want ten Administrators who will create
excellent and orderly plans but never have the energy to go anywhere.
Nor do you want ten Barbarians, each with the strong will and singular
focus to fight a battle. You also need the Builders, the engineers and
specialists who know how to make complex things work and Explorers to
expand the territory. And you need Administrators who bring order to
complex organizations and tasks through counting and recording. But you
do not need the excess of administration that is bureaucracy. You need
leaders, or you need to become a leader, who can bring these
personalities together in a harmonious orchestra.

Another
lesson regards the role of personalities versus process and principles.
Civilizations, when they have been at their peak, have had senates,
election processes, systems of law, and separation of powers. When Rome
was being born it was highly reliant on principles. This was the period,
generally regarded as the peak of the civilization, when the Roman
senate was supreme and the acceptance of Roman law and order prevailed.
It then was overcome with cults and clashes of personality and the law
became subservient to the personalities. The process of disintegration
exactly paralleled the decline of the reliance on principles and process
and the return of dominance of personalities.

For the past forty years Lawrence M. Miller has worked to improve the performance of organizations and the skills of their leaders. His expertise is derived from hands on experience creating change in the culture of hundreds of organizations.

He began his work in youth prisons after recognizing that the learning system in the organization had exactly the opposite of its intended effect – increasing, rather than decreasing, dysfunctional behavior. For four years he worked to redesign the prison system by establishing the first free-economy behind prison walls, where each inmate had to pay rent, maintain a checking account, and pay for everything he desired. This was his first application of organizational transformation.

He has been consulting, writing and speaking about business organization and culture since 1973. After ten years with another consulting firm, he formed his own firm, the Miller Howard Consulting Group in 1983. In 1998 he sold his firm to Towers Perrin, an international human resource consulting firm and became a Principal of that firm. In 1999 he left that firm to focus on solo consulting projects.

He and his firm were one of the early proponents of team-based management and worked with many clients to implement Team Management from the senior executive team to include every level and every employee in the organization. The Team Management process created a company of business managers, with every employee focused on continuous improvement of business performance. In addition to directing the overall change process, Mr. Miller personally coached the senior management team of many of his clients.

The implementation of Team Management led to the realization that the whole-system of the organization needed to be redesigned to create alignment so all systems, structure, skills, style and symbols support the same goals and culture. From this realization he developed the process of Whole System Architecture that is a high involvement method of rethinking all of the systems, structures and culture of the organization. Among his consulting clients have been 3M, Corning, Shell Oil Company, Amoco and Texaco, Shell Chemicals, Air Canada and Varig Airlines, Eastman Chemicals, Xerox, Harris Corporation, McDonald's and Chick-fil-A, Merck and Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, United Technologies, Metropolitan Life and Landmark Communications.

Mr. Miller has authored ten books, among them American Spirit: Visions of A New Corporate Culture, which was the text for Honda of America's course on their values and culture; and Barbarians to Bureaucrats: Corporate Life Cycle Strategies, which draws on the history of the rise and fall of civilizations to illustrate the patterns of leadership and evolution in corporate cultures. Most recently he authored Getting to Lean – Transformational Change Management that draws on the best change management practices such as socio-technical system design, appreciative inquiry, and systems thinking or learning organizations to provide a road map to transforming organizations. He has also authored Team Kata - Your Guide to Becoming A High Performing Team, the core human process of lean organizations. Most recently he published The Lean Coach that corresponds to his course on Coaching Leaders for Success. He has appeared on the Today Show, CNN, made numerous appearances on CNBC, has written for The New York Times and been the subject of a feature story in Industry Week magazine.